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New York Times: From 2006 through 2009, Syria suffered its most extreme drought in modern times. According to a new computer-modeling study by Colin Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, the drought's unusual severity was most likely due to the effects of climate change. Whether the drought contributed to the outbreak in 2011 of Syria's continuing civil war is controversial. Crop failures prompted up to 1.5 million people to move from rural areas to Syria's towns and cities, intensifying social tensions. However, the initial protests that sparked the war were largely for political, not economic, reforms.

Wall Street Journal: On 1 March Ikea announced a new line of furniture that features Qi-standard wireless charging stations. Wireless charging uses induction to provide energy to smartphones and other electronics that have the capability enabled. The furniture will be available in stores in Europe and the US on 15 April. The wireless charging marketplace is hotly contested with three different standards competing for global dominance. The Qi standard that Ikea chose is run by the Wireless Power Consortium and is supported by phone makers such as Samsung, HTC, and Microsoft. The Power Matters Alliance (PMA) standard is most common in the US and has recently partnered with Starbucks. The third standard is the Alliance For Wireless Power (A4WP).

Nature: India's 2015–16 budget, announced last Friday, disappointed many of the country's scientists because it did not include an overall boost in science funding. Although India's principal science funding agency, the Ministry of Science and Technology, received an 8% budget increase, other agencies had their budgets cut, among them the Ministry for Earth Sciences, whose allocation fell by 4.6%. Despite the flat science budget, India will expand its Indian Institutes of Technology system. Two new IIT centers now have funding.

New Scientist: The Casimir effect arises when metal plates held parallel and extremely close together in a vacuum attract each other. It happens because the metal sheets damp quantum fluctuations between the plates but not outside them. Because the effect is generic to quantum fields, it could have counterparts in other forces. In a new paper, James Quach of the University of Tokyo proposes that detecting a gravitational Casimir effect would constitute evidence of gravity's quantum nature. Confining quantum fluctuations in a gravitational field could be done, says Quach, by using plates made from supercooled superconductors.

New Scientist: Great white sharks favor dawn and dusk for their attacks. Suspecting that the Sun's low position on the horizon might be behind that preference, Charlie Huveneers of Flinders University in Australia and his colleagues conducted an experiment at sea. They lured great white sharks to their boat using fish oil and minced fish. They then tossed chunks of tuna into the water and observed how the sharks attacked their "prey" at different times of day. When they attacked at dawn and dusk, the sharks invariably approached the tuna chunks with the Sun behind them. Huveneers speculates that the sharks use the Sun's glare to hide their attacks.

BBC: A £1 billion ($1.54 billion) plan to build a tidal-lagoon-driven power plant has won the approval of UK energy secretary Ed Davey, although the government is still in negotiations with the company behind the proposal. Tidal Lagoon Power wants to build an artificial lagoon off the coast of Swansea and use giant turbines embedded in seawalls to capture energy from the tides. It also proposes to expand to six more sites throughout the UK and says the combined plants could produce 8% of the country's energy at a cost of £30 billion. The initial cost of the electricity generated by the Swansea plant would be £168 per kilowatt hour but would drop to £90 when a second plant opened. That reduced cost would be in the same range as the predicted cost for the power from a planned nuclear plant, but the lagoon plant would also have a longer lifetime and be safer than the nuclear one. The plan, however, is facing some environmental challenges because of the impact the seawalls could have on local shorelines and wildlife.

Nature: The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, just months after releasing its fifth climate assessment, is already organizing for the next edition of the report. At a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, at the end of February, the group approved roughly the same framework used to guide the fifth report. The mostly minor changes are primarily focused on obtaining wider input and more effective sharing of the study results. The panel wants to increase the representation of scientists from the developing world, particularly by using more non-English scientific literature. It also wants to include more science communicators in the process to better reach the nonscientific public. To assist in that, the panel intends to open some of its closed-door meetings to researchers. The panel is also trying to find a new chairperson following the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri, who stepped down in response to allegations he sexually harassed a colleague at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, India.

Science: A team led by Randall Hulet of Rice University in Houston, Texas, has trapped a collection of 100 000 to 250 000 lithium-6 ions in an optical lattice and, using lasers, caused the ions to settle into an antiferromagnetic state—that is, a pattern in which neighboring spins alternate between up and down. The feat is significant because high-temperature superconductivity emerges from a antiferromagnetic state. What's more, Hulet's lattice is a physical embodiment of the Fermi–Hubbard model, a physically simple yet mathematically intractable description of electron–electron interactions. With further experimental advances, Hulet and his team could prove (or disprove) whether the model is sufficient to capture the physics of high-temperature superconductivity.